BY STEVEN THEUNISSEN
Whilst Australians panicked about the attempt by about 400 refugees to find refuge from various forms of misery during the "Tampa crisis", climate change is expected to create a new refugee crisis, as millions of people lose their homes to rising sea levels, floods, droughts and other extreme weather conditions.
So far, the government has ignored the issue, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol that would reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and sending asylum seekers to islands such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea, which are themselves vulnerable to rising sea levels.
Is that the best we can do?
Australia has the greatest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, 25% higher than those of the US and five times the emissions per average Indonesian, according to the World Resource Institute. (The institute publishes a global warming map at <http://www.wri.org/climate/contributions_map.html>.)
Australia is a major contributor to climate change, yet we shun any responsibility for our actions.
Instead, we shift the blame — the victims become the perpetrators, and the perpetrators become the victims. According to government rhetoric, Australia is the victim of a refugee invasion: thousands upon thousands of boat people are accosting our shores and threatening our way of life.
But could it be the other way around? Could it be that our way of life is threatening the lives of millions of people, forcing them to flee war, economic plunder and climate change? Should we reflect on our way of life, how our political and economic structures create war, poverty, starvation and ecological disasters? These are the factors which are contributing to our refugee crisis — this is not some kind of demonic invasion of boat villains!
The refugee crisis cannot be solved through the creation of a fortress Australia, where the next waves of "boat people" are met by SAS troops in the middle of the Indian Ocean and escorted to small islands which cannot support them.
Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, explained in a December 1993 article in US journal BioScience that environmental refugees will increase six-fold to a staggering 150 million people in the next 50 years. If sea levels rise by just one metre, all Shanghai will be flooded along with 96% of its surrounding province.
Tuvalu leaders have already announced that they plan to abandon their homeland and have reached an agreement with New Zealand so all 11,000 citizens of Tuvalu can migrate to NZ as sea levels rise.
Bangladesh's environment minister, Sajeeda Choudhury, has argued that if sea levels rise as predicted by the scientific community, her country will have millions of homeless people within the next few decades.
According to the International Red Cross World Disasters Report 2001 ( The first step to resolving a potential disaster is to acknowledge that it exists. Once this has been done, we can explore potential solutions — addressing climate change, increasing foreign aid to help countries confronted by climate change and others.
Burying our heads in the sand, however, is not an option: we would risk having 150 million environmental refugees on our conscience — starving, homeless and completely destitute — in less than one human lifetime.
[Steven Theunissen is a member of Friends of the Earth, Melbourne. For more information visit the Friends of the Earth web site on <http://www.foe.org.au/nc/nc_enviro_pop.html>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 5, 2003.
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